DUP head arrives for talks with UK leader May

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative party resumed talks on a deal to prop up her minority government on Wednesday as she faced a battle over her Brexit strategy just days before European Union divorce talks are due to begin. That means the DUP would back the government on confidence motions and budget votes, but it’s not a coalition government or a broader pact. The DUP is a socially conservative group that opposes abortion and same-sex marriage and had links to Protestant paramilitary groups during Ireland’s sectarian “Troubles”.

Following more than an hour of talks between May and DUP leader Arlene Foster on Tuesday, May said the discussion had been productive and Foster said she hoped a deal could be done “sooner rather than later”.

“Although Foster insists her party is not homophobic, will its views further damage the Tory brand among young and centrist voters?” he writes.

After House Speaker John Bercow was re-elected without challenge, a chastened May quipped: “At least someone got a landslide”. “Talks are going well”. Instead, she found the opposition Labour Party unexpectedly making a strong second-place showing and national politics thrown into disarray.

Elation in the Corbyn camp is tempered by electoral reality, said Dunt, making a comparison to last year’s US presidential campaign.

“As I reflect on the result, I will reflect on what we need to do in the future to take the party forward”, May said before adding “I obviously wanted a different result”. Britain looks set for months of political chaos.

When asked about the Daily Telegraph article, Michael Gove, a minister who campaigned for Brexit, told ITV: “This is news to me”.

Britain’s typically right-wing press savaged May over the election outcome, questioning whether she will be able to remain in power after a result that leaves her reliant on uniting rival factions within her party to deliver Brexit. The Evening Standard, edited by ex-Treasury chief George Osborne, is reporting that Cabinet ministers have initiated talks with Labour lawmakers.

Pressed on the reports, Environment Secretary Michael Gove declined to deny it. Parliament now “deserves a say”, he said, adding that there was “perhaps an opportunity to consult more widely with the other parties on how best we can achieve it”.

As well as supporting “the right to access abortion in Northern Ireland”, they said the rally would also protest a Tory-DUP alliance.

Well, May is going to attempt to form an agreement with the 10 MPs that were elected from the Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP.

Major, who helped lay the foundations of the 1998 agreement that ended two decades of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland when he was in government, said it would imperil the United Kingdom government’s impartial role in the peace process.

Mrs Foster and her deputy Nigel Dodds spent yesterday lunchtime at Downing Street thrashing out the details of the “confidence and supply” arrangement but despite widespread expectation, the talks ended without an announcement.

On Wednesday, the longest-serving lawmaker in the House of Commons and most prominent Tory advocate of the European Union, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke, backed the calls for a new approach and cast doubt on the wisdom of forming an alliance with DUP.

May and even some in the Labour party say that’s not possible as one of the main motivations for leaving the European Union is to clamp down on immigration.

“My preoccupation is that time is passing, it is passing quicker than anyone believes because the subjects we have to deal with are extraordinarily complex“, he said, according to the Financial Times. “I don’t think we have anything to fear from parliament debating it”, he told the BBC.